A San Francisco financier who was held up as a symbol of the scourge of international sex tourism a decade ago won a victory in his long and unusual legal battle when Mexican authorities charged some of his chief accusers with extorting him, his attorneys said Monday.

The fall of Thomas Frank White, a multimillionaire investor and philanthropist, began when he was arrested in Thailand in 2003.

He was flown to Mexico in 2005 to face sex charges that were later thrown out, but remains locked up in Puerto Vallarta while he fights extradition to the U.S., where a 2004 indictment alleges he traveled to Mexico and Thailand to molest boys.

White, 77, has also paid out about $10 million in civil settlements to alleged juvenile victims in the U.S. and Mexico.

But White and his supporters maintain he was targeted by sophisticated con artists who - in a bid to dig into his deep pockets - rounded up vulnerable Mexican boys from the streets and paid them to fabricate stories about White assaulting them after plying them with drugs and booze.

White's lawyers said Monday that Mexican authorities had recently charged three Mexicans and three Americans with extorting White, and were looking to extradite the Americans.

The accused include former San Francisco attorney David Replogle, who represented the boys from Puerto Vallarta, as well as a former Mexican judge who assisted the boys as a court-appointed guardian.

Also charged was Daniel Garcia, a 30-year-old Central Valley native and notorious grifter. He accused White of sexually assaulting him as a teenager, then went on to work alongside Replogle in Puerto Vallarta.

A fourth defendant is one of the Mexican boys who said he had been molested.

Mexican authorities, though, are not likely to be able to prosecute Replogle and Garcia. They are serving life sentences in connection with a 2008 murder in Palm Springs in which they and others swindled and killed a 74-year-old retiree.

It's unclear what effect the extortion charges will have on White's legal battle.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, which secured an indictment in 2004 charging White with conspiring to travel to other countries to have sex with minors, declined to comment Monday.

In a statement released by his attorneys, White said, "After being falsely imprisoned for 10 years, Mexico has finally acknowledged that I was the victim of an egregious extortion scheme which deprived me of a decade of freedom, cost me millions of dollars and has destroyed my reputation."

One of White's attorneys, Stuart Hanlon, said, "This confirms what we've always said is true. This case is a creation of David Replogle and Daniel Garcia. These people have snookered the FBI and the U.S. government."

White is also seeking to overturn the $7 million federal court settlement he paid out to 20 Mexican boys, arguing it was the product of fraud. The boys are receiving payments through a trust fund, attorneys said.

John Hill, an Oakland attorney who helped represent the Mexican boys who sued White in federal court, said White had entered into the settlement voluntarily.

He said 10 of the boys "were examined over a period of a week by a bilingual psychiatrist, and he was of the impression that their stories were credible and that they were seriously injured as a result of sexual molestation."

Geoffrey Rotwein, who has represented White since he challenged the settlement in 2005, said White had settled rather than have a civil trial go on without him.